THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS

RESEARCH PAPER NUMBER 830

JANUARY 2002

THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK AUCTION RECORDS

Stuart Kells

Department of Economics The University of Melbourne Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia.

ISSN 08 19-2642 ISBN 0 7340 2485 1

ME UNIVERSITY OF

MELBOURNE

The Australian Book Auction Records *

Stuart Kells

Department of Economics

University of Melbourne

January 2002

This paper describes the Australian Book Auction Records, a dataset of prices and other

information collected from auctions of rare books. The dataset contains a large number of

prices from Australian rare book auctions, and a much smaller number from London rare

book auctions. All the books in the records are connected in some way to Australasia. The

sources and inclusion criteria of the records are set out, and the process of converting the

records into a digital database is described. The paper presents a statistical profile of the data

which includes the distribution of prices, the sizes of the auction events documented and

details about repeat sales. The usefulness of the data is discussed, and suggestions for

supplementing the data are provided, along with directions for future research.

* The author is grateful to Jill Burdon, John Creedy and Fiona Kells for helpful advice.

1. INTRODUCTION

In the past decade, the economic study of auctions has experienced extraordinary growth. The

empirical literature features studies of auctions of coins, cattle, spectrum licences, forestry

leases, fishing entitlements, fine art, business equipment, real estate and many other assets.

Researchers have also undertaken experimental studies, and a large theoretical literature has

emerged. One explanation for this interest is the suitability of auctions to studying the

formation of prices, Auctions are also an important sale mechanism in their own right, and

one whose empirical properties are not yet fully understood. Specific lines of inquiry in the

study of auctions have included the efficiency and revenue properties of different types of

auction, the effects of different characteristics of bidders (particularly how they arrive at their

valuations), the accuracy of information disclosed by auctioneers, sequential auctions and

collusion among buyers. For surveys of the auctions literature, see Klemperer (1999)

(theoretical); Laffont (1997) and Hendricks and Paarsch (1995) (empirical); and Kagel (1995)

(experimental).

Rare book auctions have been largely neglected in the empirical literature. This is

despite the fact that they have a number of features that make them promising targets for

analysis. These features include a wide spread of asset values, from very low value books (a

few dollars) to high value ones (up to a million dollars), sequential auctions of similar and

identical books, some institutional variety, and simple sale environments that have many

similarities with those of many other assets. Books are almost always sold by way of

ascending or 'English' auctions, a type of auction that has wide empirical relevance and that

has been the subject of a great deal of theoretical work. Another attraction of book auctions is

their longevity. Book auctions have been around for a long time, making it possible to trace

patterns in prices and the evolution of market institutions.

This paper describes the Ausrralian Book Auction Records (ABAR), a dataset of prices

and other information collected from auctions of rare books. Most of the books in ABAR

were sold in Australia. A small number were sold in London. All the books in ABAR are

connected in some way to Australasia. Section 2 introduces ABAR and defines some relevant

terms. Section 3 sets out the method of data collection and the inclusion criteria, and sketches

the institutional environment of book auctions in Australia. In Section 4, the data in ABAR

are described, along with the approach adopted by the present author to convert the records

into a digital database. A statistical profile of the data is presented in section 5. In section 6,

the limitations of the dataset are discussed, along with possibilities for extending and

supplementing it. Section 7 gives some concluding comments about the value of the data for

economists, and directions for future research.

2, THl3 AUSTRALIAN BOOK AUCTION RECORDS

Sale by auction has for centuries been a favoured way of disposing of valuable books. As

early as the seventeenth century, there were auctioneers in England who dealt exclusively in

books and paintings (Learmount, 1985).' Today, there are vibrant book auction markets in

Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and many other countries.

In Australia, the results from auctions of old, fine and rare books of 'Australasian

interest' are published in ABAR. ABAR is published every two years.2 The early issues of

ABAR, covering the period 1969 to 1978, were compiled by Mrs Margaret Woodhouse. The

current series, so far covering the period 1983 to 1999, is compiled by Mrs Jill Burdon.

ABAR was not published from 1979 to 1982. The ABAR volumes are offered for sale by the

publishers (Australian Book Auction Records) and copies are kept in the National and State

libraries, the University of Melbourne library and other major reference collections in

Australia. The latest volume, 1998-99, was published in May 2000. The next volume is due

for release in May/June 2002. More than 40,000 individual transactions have now been

recorded in ABAR.

Buyers and sellers of old and rare books are ABAR's principal audience. At any point

in time, the value of a particular book is uncertain. For buyers, historical price information is

useful for valuing potential acquisitions. For sellers, it helps in setting reserve prices and

choosing when to sell. The scarcity of particular books, a major factor in their value, can in

part be inferred from how often (if at all) they come up for sale. As well as prices, ABAR

includes information about the books' condition. This can be used to develop a picture of the

typical state of the books in circulation, and can guide decisions about whether or not to

acquire imperfect examples. It is useful to know that all copies of a title share the same fault

(for example, browning of the leaves), or that a book offered for sale is inferior to most other

copies that appeared on the market over a given time period.

' Book auctions were held in Continental Europe before they reached the British Isles. According to Carter (1977), the first book auctions in England were introduced from Holland before 1680.

One volume of ABAR covered three years: 1983 to 1985.

Buyers and sellers are not the only potential users of the data. For librarians and

historians, the frequency with which books are offered and the prices they realise give

insights into tastes, and are an indicator of developing cultural interests. In Australia, recent

trends in buying have centred on books about Antarctica, books connected with Norman

Lindsay and his family, and children's books. Economists are another set of potential users of

the data. The usefulness of the data for economists is addressed in the following sections.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to define some terms. Unless the meaning is clear

from the context, 'sale event' will be used to refer to a session held by an auction firm over

one or a few days, in which a set of objects were offered for sale in a series of individual

(ascending) auctions. In each individual auction, a single 'lot' will have been offered for sale.

The lot might have been a single object, or a group of objects offered together. Where one of

the individual auctions resulted in a lot being sold, that will be referred to as a 'transaction'.

In each transaction, a lot will have transferred from a seller to a buyer for money. Lots that

were not sold, because they failed to reach the reserve price, are said to have been 'passed in'.

The word 'book' can mean a number of things. In this paper, 'copy' is used to refer to

a book as a physical object; for example, a particular instance of the first edition of Orwell's

1984. 'Title' is used to refer to the abstract part of the book; for example, that which is

common to all copies of the first edition of 1984 and that distinguishes them collectively from

all the other books in the world.

3. DATA COLLECTION

For a transaction to be included in ABAR, a catalogue of lots must have been issued before

the sale event, and all the lots must have been made available for inspection before bidding

started. The compilers of ABAR use the auction catalogues as the basis for the entries in each

ABAR volume. The catalogue information is surnrnarised and reorganised into a standard

format. The prices are obtained from price lists that are prepared by the auction firms and

released after the sales, In the auction catalogues, every lot is assigned a number. The

compilers use the lot numbers to collate the prices with the catalogue entries. The compilers

of ABAR acquire the catalogues and price lists directly from the auction firms, and by

attending sale events. The compilers and their representatives attended many but not all of the

sale events documented. Results from London sales are provided to ABAR's compilers

primarily by the local subsidiary of Christie's London, Christie's Australia. (It is in the

interests of Christie's Australia to do so, as the London prices are frequently much higher

than the Australian prices for the same books.) The main Australian auction houses that deal

in books contribute data to ABAR. Christie's, Sotheby's, Leonard Joel, Lawsons, Kenneth

Hince, Theodore Bruce, William Ellenden, Pioneer Books and Australian Book Auctions are

among the most significant contributors.

All the books in ABAR were sold at ascending auctions. At auctions of this kind, there

is an auctioneer who calls out higher and higher asking prices until no bidder will accept the

price called. The penultimately called price is referred to as the hammer or gavel price. Most

auctions in ABAR were held by commercial auction houses and closely resembled the

standard fine art auction in the way they were organised and publicised. At a typical book

auction, bidders register with the auction house before the sale, and are assigned a bidder

number, which they display on a card or a paddle when bidding. The auctions are normally

held in salerooms, galleries, hotels and public venues like town halls. They are advertised in

the press and through direct mail. There are no attendance fees.

There are some exceptions to this set-up. The most notable are the 'slow auctions'

held every two years at the University of New South Wales book fair. At these events, bids

are posted on a board, and bidding extends over several days. To date, twelve of these slow

auctions have been recorded in ABAR, and together they account for 716 transactions or 1.68

per cent of the total number of transactions. Another book fair auction in ABAR was held at

the 1999 University of Queensland Alumni Book Fair (sixty-five transactions were recorded).

ABAR also documents a series of twelve charity auctions at Canberra Life-line (1975-77,

1983-91). These account for 176 transactions (0.4 per cent of the total). Two other charity

auctions are in ABAR: one that was held at Monash University in 1972, and one held by the

MS Society in Camberwell, Victoria, in 1976. Many books are now auctioned on the internet,

a sale environment very different to the standard saleroom. ABAR does not presently include

results from internet auctions.

All the books in ABAR are of 'Australasian interest'. For the purposes of ABAR, this

is defined as books and periodicals written by Australians, or published in Australia, or

written about Australia or Australians, or about Antarctica, New Zealand or the South Pacific.

The definition captures fiction books as well as non-fiction books on many different subjects,

including history, biography, geology, horse breeding, anthropology and militaria, Rare books

auctioned in Australia that do not satisfy the Australasian interest criterion are not included.

The range of books that fall into this latter group is equally broad.

In addition to the Australasian interest requirement, the compilers of ABAR have

applied a minimum price cut-off. The minimum price has risen in nominal terms over the life

of the series. Currently, books must have realised at least forty-five Australian dollars in the

two years covered by the particular ABAR volume to be eligible for inclusion. In the first

year of ABAR, the cut-off was five dollars. The cut-off is a loose one. For example, if two

different copies of a book are sold in a given year, and only one satisfies the price cut-off, the

other will be included for comparative purposes.

ABAR includes some sale events in which book lots were offered along with other

items, such as paintings, prints and furniture, as well as sales entirely of books. Some of the

books were offered by auction firms that mostly sell livestock and farm supplies.

Since 1986, ABAR has included information from some London sale events. The

London entries are not comprehensive of Australiana sold in London. They are included to

provide comparative prices for key books of Australasian interest sold there. The British

publication Book Auction Records provides a fuller compilation of price results from sales in

London, elsewhere in the United Kingdom and in Continental Europe. The London entries in

ABAR are not representative of the dataset as a whole. This point is taken up in section 5.

4. DATASET CONTENT

The compilers have aimed to make ABAR comprehensive of sales that fall within the

inclusion criteria described in section 3. In each ABAR volume, the records are organised

alphabetically, principally by author's surname. Periodicals and anonymous works are

referenced by title. Some books are entered more than once-for example, under the author's

name and under the name of special publishers like the Halcluyt Society, the Libraries Board

of South Australia and the Golden Cockerel Press. To derive the summary statistics that

follow in section 5, such repeat entries were removed.

Table 1 sets out the information provided in ABAR for each title that is listed.

Table 1: Information given for each title in ABAR

applying at the sale:

Prices are inclusive of buyers' premia. (Buyers' premia are discussed in section 4.)

Book details

I Author or authors I Periodicals are entered under title, and no author I

Auctlon details

auction catala~ue. - --

Other salient details of the book eg. whether the copy has a special association with the author

Bibliographicat reference number Only if the book is listed in one of the principal bibliographies of Australiana, eg. J. A. Ferguson's Bibliography of Australia, or M. K. Beddie's

When the auction was held

I

The name of the auction firm that I For book fair auctions, details of the fair are given

I premium applying for the I I

The following is an example of an ABAR entry:

Plunkett, John Hubert. The Australian Magistrate. Syd 1835. F2002. 91 Ap C* $880 (minor

foxing)

The reference 'F2002' (the 'Ferguson number') is to J. A. Ferguson's Bibliography of

Australia. (The bibliography covers books published before 1901, so many of the books sold

in ABAR fall outside its scope.) The reference '91 Ap C' refers to one of the sale events listed

at the start of the ABAR volume. This particular sale took place on 8 April 1991 at the

prernjses of Christie's Australia at 1 Darling Street, South Yarra (Melbourne). The asterisk

means that the sale featured a buyer's premium, which in this case was 10 per cent, implying

the hammer price was $800, The condition information, shown in parentheses, was taken

from the auction catalogue and indicates that the leaves of the book were foxed. (Foxing is

spotty discolouration caused by damp and chemical reactions in inferior paper.)

ABAR does not identify sellers or winning bidders, nor any details of losing bids.

Sometimes, the seller or sellers are identified in the source catalogues. Other times, no details

of sellers are given. (Often, book auction lots are catalogued under the uninformative heading

'The property of a gentleman'.) The identity of buyers and losing bidders can sometimes be

discovered directly at the sale events themselves. But buyers can bid over the telephone, leave

'order' bids with the auctioneer, and bid through agents-booksellers often represent their

clients at sale events. Accordingly, direct observation is a poor way to gather information

about ultimate buyers. Some auction houses publish lists of buyers along with the sale prices.

Again, the option of agency bidding makes these buyer lists unreliable.

ABAR does not give lot numbers, nor the total number of lots sold at a particular sale

event. Using ABAR, it is not possible to work out how many lots were offered, as multi-book

lots and non-Australiana lots are not included. Also, some items that are offered and that fit

the inclusion criteria will be passed in, or withdrawn from sale after the printing of the

catalogue. It is only possible to work out the total number of single book lots sold, which can

be done by collating all the entries in an ABAR volume that were drawn from a particular sale

event. To ascertain which items were passed in or withdrawn from sale, it is necessary to

cross reference ABAR with the source catalogues.

In Australia, it is common for book auction firms to engage experts to develop price

estimates. Estimates are also a feature of auctions of art and many other assets. The estimates

are published before sale events in the auction catalogues, and are intended to give buyers

guidance about likely sale prices. (The potential for strategic behaviour in setting the

estimates is significant.) For each lot, high and low estimates are usually given. These

estimates are not included in ABAR.~ Likewise, sellers' fees are sometimes documented in

the source catalogues but are not given in ABAR.

Estimates were obtained by the present author from a selection of catalogues and matched with the prices in ABAR, for a comparative analysis that is being prepared for publication.

Some other useful pieces of information are not included because they are secret.

Books sold at auction in Australia nearly always have secret reserve prices. Sellers instruct

auctioneers to pass in lots that fail to reach the reserve. Other information useful to

researchers, such as bidders' valuations, how many books they want when multiple copies are

offered, and their attitudes to risk, is also secret in real world auctions. It is possible to make

some weak inferences from ABAR about the types of buyers present at particular sale events.

For example, an auction held by a firm that largely specialises in the sale of livestock is likely

to attract a different (but overlapping) set of buyers compared with a high-end auction of

paintings and books. Book fair auctions might attract a larger proportion of 'amateurs' than

would be encountered at major auction house sales.

ABAR is not presently published in an electronic form. In order to examine the price

data, the present author coded the records and combined them in a digital da taba~e .~ Every

title in every volume was assigned a unique number. For example, record 772901 is the

2901st title in the 1977-78 volume of ABAR ( A Month in the Bush of Australia by T. Walker,

1838, sold for $1 100 on 22 March 1978 by Christie's at the Age Gallery, Melbourne). Every

sale event was also given a numeric identifier (the March 1978 Christie's sale is number

7804, as it was the fourth sale in 1978). Two copies of the same title sold in the same year by

two different auction firms have the same title identifier but different auction identifiers.

Where multiple editions of the same title appeared in a single ABAR volume, each edition

was given a different title identifier.5

For each copy sold, the title identifier, the auction identifier, the name of the auction

firm, the year and month of the auction and the price were entered in the database. For a

subset of the sales, Ferguson numbers and buyers' prernia were also entered.

Where multiple copies of a title were sold at a particular sale event, the sale order was

recorded, as was the number of copies sold. For example, the second of three copies sold has

'2' in the order field, and '3' in the number of copies field. Where only one copy of a book

was sold at a particular sale event (this accounts for the majority of cases), 'ly was recorded

in the order and number of copies fields.

Some condition information was also coded. For those instances where two copies of a

book were sold in a particular sale event, the database indicates whether the two copies were

Researchers wishing to use the electronic database should contact the present author via quarle@ozemail.com.au. The author is grateful to Mrs Jill Burdon for p e h s s i o n to make the data available to researchers.

equivalent in condition, whether they differed in condition and the better book was sold first,

or whether they differed in condition and the better book was sold second.

5. DATA PROFILE

This section sets out the dimensions of ABAR that were derived using the database described

in section 4. Table 2 shows the number of auction events captured by ABAR in every year of

its existence. On average, there are fifteen auction events in ABAR each year. The lowest

coverage was achieved in each of the inception years of the two ABAR series: 1969 and

1983. In total, 413 auction events have been documented in M A R .

The great majority of the auctions documented in ABAR were held in Sydney or

Melbourne. Auctions held in Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Queanbeyan and

Launceston were also documented. Table 2 shows the number of auction firms who

contributed data to ABAR in each year of the series. The number of auctioneers contributing

data to ABAR has changed over time, as firms have been wound up or merged with other

firms, and new firms have entered. In 1999, Pioneer Books suspended its book auctions, and a

major new entrant, Australian Book Auctions, joined the firms contributing data to ABAR.

Some auctioneers have chosen to stop auctioning books, in favour of fine art, furniture and

other items. The table shows that between the late 1970s and the late 1990s, the segment of

the book auction circuit captured by ABAR became more concentrated.

Sale events of many different sizes are documented in ABAR. The average number of

lots for sale events in ABAR is one hundred lots, The largest auction documented is the 1969

sale by Theodore Bruce & Co, of the Charles Glover Library. This sale, at the Melbourne

showgrounds, saw 1,856 lots of Australasian interest sold. The total number of books

transacted at this sale event was somewhat larger (recall that ABAR excludes non-Australiana

and multi-book lots). At the second largest sale event in ABAR, a Leonard Joel sale on 15-17

November 1994, 1,621 items of Australasian interest were sold. Figure 1 shows the

distribution (in logarithms) of the number of single book lots of Australiana that were sold at

each of the 413 auction events in ABAR. The figure shows that there was a large number of

relatively small sale events, and a small number of large events.

The words 'edition' and 'impression' have technical meanings. A new edition of a book is created when the type is reset. A new impression is created when an additional run of books is printed using type that was already set for the previous impression.

Figure 1: Number of Iots per sale event

Table 2 shows the number of transactions recorded in each year of ABAR. The

number of sale events and the number of transactions have fluctuated considerably from year

to year. The total number of items included to date is 42,511 items. In terms of the number of

books sold, the boom years for Australiana at auction were 1970 and 1994. (The Leonard Joel

sale of 15-17 November 1994 accounted for more than half the 1994 transactions.) Table 2

also shows the value of each year's sales in 1999 dollar^.^ The gross value of the transactions

recorded in ABAR is $37.2 million. The table hints that the 1980s asset price boom affected

the book market. The value of 1988 transactions was more than twice the value in any other

year, and the average price was highest in 1988. This indicates not only that the boom arrived,

but that it arrived late.7

The figures were adjusted using the consumer price index figures in Australian Bureau of Statistics catalogue no. 640 1 .O. ' Dedman (1996) documented a similar phenomenon in Australian art auctions. His 'art market index' peaked almost a year after the sharemarket crash. He also presented evidence that the art market crashed in Australia before it did overseas.

Table 2: Number of sale events, number of auction firms, number of lots, value of sales

and average price for each year of ABAR

Year Number of sale events

5 12 11 14 18 12 12 20 15 17 7

12 10 18 16 20 19 18 20 17 13 18 15 20 16 19

nm: No! meaningful

Number of auction firms

4 8 7 8 8 9 8

13 9

11 4 7 5 8 7 8 6 8 6 7 4 6 3 4 4 6 5

nm

Number of lots sold

839 2,939 1,729

593 1,131 1,783 1,639 1,446 2,207 2,075

974 1,564 1,538 2,387 1,324 2,245 2,079 1,376 1,725 1,404 1,152 2,785

94 1 1,127 1,165 1,265

Total value (1 999 dollars)

225,562

Average price (1 999 dollars)

268.85 462.69 363.05 951.17 600.12 336.60 592.09 321.62 349.68 407.46 364.05 741.08 982.22

1001.06 743.64

2982.07 1306.77 724.50

I 994.73 1980.65

I 685.32 776.1 8 71 4.39 1 1633.19

1591.22 1 504.38

Table 3 gives the number of transactions accounted for by each of the auction firms in

ABAR. The auction firm Lawsons accounted for the largest number of transactions (9772, or

23 per cent of the total number). Most of the firms accounted for a small share of the

transactions. A small number of firms accounted for a large share: more than 70 per cent of

the transactions in ABAR took place at sale events held by just four auction firms-Lawsons,

Christie's Australia, Leonard Joel and Kenneth Wince. The next four largest contributors

accounted for 15 per cent of the total number of transactions. The smallest fifteen firms

together accounted for less than 2 per cent of the transactions. The auction firms differed

somewhat in the segments of the auction market that they serviced during the sample period.

Some targeted buyers of expensive books in metropolitan Melbourne and Sydney. Others

primarily serviced the other end of the market.

Table 3: Number of transactions recorded for each auction firm in ABAR

Christie's Australia

Kenneth Hince 4338

Theodore Bruce Sotheby's Australia

Pioneer Books/Academy Enterprises

University of NSW slow auctions

Christie's London Australian Book Auctions Angus and McNicol Paul France Webster F&G William Ellenden Steer Reads Rees Strange Sotheby's London 1 42

Wright

Note: 'Other' comprises sales by fifteen auction firms: none of rhese fifteen

j ims accounted for more than one hundred transactions in ABAR.

Distribution of prices

Table 2 showed the average prices realised over the life of ABAR, and how they have varied

under the influence of occasional sales at very high prices. Table 4 shows the highest prices

recorded in each year of the series. Books sold in London figure heavily in the list of highest

prices, as do natural history books. Seventeen of the top prices were achieved by books about

birds.

On their own, average prices and highest prices are not very informative about the

overall profile of prices. They conceal the fact that the distribution of prices in ABAR is

highly skewed. In each year, there are a large number of prices at or near the minimum cut-

off, and a small number of high-value transactions which account for a large share of the

aggregate sale value. An example of these high-value sales is the sale of John Gould's

complete works in 1997. This single lot accounted for 53 per cent of the value of 1997 sales

in the database.'

Figure 2 shows the distribution of the logs of all the (real) prices in the dataset. The

top decile of prices (425 1 books) accounts for 78 per cent of the total real value of sales. The

top percentile (425 books) accounts for 49 per cent of the total real value. Thirty-four items

realised more than $100,000; 475 items realised more than $10,000 (figures in 1999 prices).

A similar skewed profile is evident in every year of the dataset.

The nominal value of 1997 sales was $1.82 million.

14

Table 4: Nominal highest prices realised in each year of ABAR

1 1976 1 5,500 I John Gould, Birds of Australia I Christie's, Sydney

/ 1991 1 419,189' 1 John Gould, Birds of Australia I Christie's, London I

* includes buyer's premium.

Figure 2: Logarithms of prices in 1999 values

London prices

From 1986 to 1997, results from selected London sales were included in B A R . The

following table (Table 5) gives the dates of the London sales in ABAR, and the number of

lots whose prices were documented.

The London sale events were held by Christie's London and Sotheby's London.

Christie's accounted for nearly all the London sale events in ABAR, and the majority of the

London lots transacted. However, while only one Sotheby's sale event was included, it saw

many more lots of Australasian interest sold than were transacted at any of the Christie's

London events in ABAR.

The cohort of books sold in London was atypical of the books in B A R . The London

sales accounted for 1.4 per cent of the number of transactions (399 items), but 20.9 per cent of

the real value of transactions. The average price realised by items sold in London was

$19,484, compared with $699 for the books sold in Australia (figures in 1999 prices).

Table 5: Number of transactions recorded for London sale events in ABAR

Firm

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Sotheby's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Christie's London

Date of sale event

April 1986

October 1986

April 1987

October 1987

April 1988

October 1988

April 1989

May 1991

October 1991

May 1992

June 1992

October 1992

November 1992

May 1993

November 1993

March 1994

April 1994

May 1995

October 1995

May 1996

September 1996

October 1996

April 1997

April 1997

Number of lots in ABAR

15

35

4

20

6

5 1

13

23

9

6

142

15

Repeat sales

Many titles appear more than once in ABAR. Table 3 gives some examples. Joseph Lycett's

Views in Australia brought the top price in two years, while John Gould's Birds of Australia

was the most valuable title twelve times. (Birds of Australia also figured in the sale of

Gould's complete works in 1997, which with buyer's premium realised nearly one million

Australian dollars.) The majority of titles referenced in any one volume of ABAR appear in at

least one other volume. One of the most frequently seen is Andrew Garran's Picturesque

Atlas of Australasia. It appears in ABAR 237 times. Other frequently appearing titles are

Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding, Arthur Phillip's The Voyage of Governor Phillip to

Botany Bay and The Art of J. J. Hilder, edited by Sydney Ure Smith and Bertram Stevens.

While it is likely that a significant number of these repeat sales arose from a single copy being

sold more than once, only in a small number of cases is there sufficient information in ABAR

to identify with certainty multiple sales of a particular copy. This information includes author

inscriptions, condition information and details of books known to be extremely rare.

The average number of times books appear in volumes of ABAR can be calculated by

dividing the number of transactions by the number of referenced titles (excluding duplicate

entries). Titles in the 1969-70 volume appear in that volume on average 1.38 times. The

corresponding figure for 1998-99 is very similar: titles in that volume appear on average 1.36

times.

The recurrence of titles within and across ABAR volumes means creating a panel of

book prices is possible. However, large variations in condition across different copies mean

users must be careful they are comparing like with like. For example, the Picturesque Atlas

copies range from very good to very poor condition, and appear in a variety of bindings and

formats, with and without the required maps. Differences of this kind will significantly

influence valuations.

It often happens that multiple copies of a particular title are offered at the same sale

event. There are 1744 instances in ABAR where two copies of a book were sold sequentially.9

In some of these pairs, the second copy was sold immediately after the first, while in others

the books were separated by other lots. Not all the 1744 pairs contain copies of equivalent

condition; only 1032 of the pairs are matched in this way. In addition to these 'doubles', there

are 188 triples in ABAR, 39 quadruples, and a small number of instances in which more than

four copies of a tile were offered at a single sale event. Using the ABAR data, Kells (2001)

examined the pattern of prices in 1028 sequential auctions of pairs of identical books and

found that there was little evidence in Australian book auctions of the 'declining price

anomaly' or 'afternoon effect'-the tendency for prices to be lower in later rounds of

sequential auctions of identical assets.

Buyers ' premia

It is typical for auction firms to charge sellers a fee related to the sale price. This fee covers

the cost of publicising and staging the auction, and is how most auction firms turn a profit. A

relatively recent feature of Australian book auctions is an additional fee levied on the buyer

and calculated as a percentage of the hammer price. Such buyers' premia first appeared in

9 It is likely there were other sequences in which the first or second item or both items were passed in for failing to reach the reserve price. It is not possible to say how often this happened without going through all the source catalogues, as passed in items are not documented in ABAR.

ABAR in 1985, at the Sotheby's sale of 16 April in Melbourne. The Christie's sale of 14

April 1986 is the next sale event in ABAR to feature a buyer's premium; both sales had

premia of ten per cent. These fees had gained a foothold in European and American book

auctions some years before this, and according to Learmount (1985) they featured in auctions

in ancient times.

Buyer's premia were prohibited in New South Wales auctions until 1993, and from

1985 to 1992 all the sales in ABAR with buyers' premia took place in Melbourne or London

(all the London sales in ABAR had buyers' premia). But within a decade of their first

appearance in Australia, buyers' premia had become commonplace in Sydney and Melbourne,

and had spread to Hobart and elsewhere. In the latest edition of ABAR (1998-99), half the

sale events and 84 per cent of the transactions involved buyers' premia, A usual premium rate

at the sale events in ABAR is 10 per cent. Premia of 15 per cent and higher are sometimes

seen, and stepped premia (eg. 15 per cent up to $30,000; 10 per cent thereafter) have been

applied here and in Britain. The total value of buyers' premia applied in the 1998-99 sales

was approximately $164,000, or 1 1.1 per cent of the total real value ($1 -48 million).

Books sold at Australian auctions after 1 July 2000 attract a 10 per cent goods and

services tax. The tax applies to the hammer price and the buyer's premium.

6. LIMITATIONS, AND SUPPLEMENTING THE DATA

The data in ABAR have some limitations. For a sale event to be included in ABAR, a

catalogue of lots must have been issued before the sale, and a price-list circulated afterward.

Sales without these documents escape the data-set. ABAR also does not document auctions

where several unrelated or loosely related books were sold as a single lot. Nor does it

document sales of books that are not of 'Australasian interest'. Because these books and

multi-book lots are excluded, and because some types of sale are not represented in the

dataset, it is possible to infer that the total value of books auctioned in Australia in 1999 was

substantially more than $840,000, and to conclude that the ABAR data are not very suitable

for drawing conclusions about the aggregate level of activity in the book auction circuit.

The compilers of ABAR have taken pains to ensure that the entries are

bibliographically accurate. Yet the publishers acknowledge that some bibliographic gaps and

shortcomings exist in the dataset. Presently, these errors are not published and go uncorrected.

It would be useful if the publishers issued lists of errors that had been identified. These lists

might be provided as an appendix to later volumes, or in the form of a supplement to the

series.

A research question with practical consequences for book buyers is whether auction

firms systematically understate or overstate price estimates in pre-sale materials. Auction

firms' estimates are widely published in catalogues, and would be a valuable addition to the

data in ABAR, so much so that the publishers are encouraged to include estimates in future

editions.'' Information about passed-in items would be another worthwhile addition to the

dataset. The fact that an item was passed in can be as useful as the information that it was sold

at a particular price.

The ABAR data could also be supplemented with information from other types of

book sale. Many booksellers distribute printed catalogues in the post. From the point of view

of studying the features of different sale mechanisms, it would be worthwhile to examine how

the asking prices in these catalogues differ from auction prices. (Booksellers' offers would

also be useful information for buyers and sellers of books.) Bookshops and book fairs are

other sources of asking prices, as are book catalogues published on the internet. The

limitation of such data is that, unlike auction records, it is not possible to tell if the asking

price has been accepted by a buyer.

Books are well-represented in on-line auctions, and these are another source of

supplementary data. Internet auctioneers like eBay and S0LD.com.a~ will increasingly

reduce the significance of where a particular auction is held-the location of a sale event

matters less if there is no actual saleroom and anyone anywhere can join in on an equal

footing. In some ways, the profusion of on-line auctions will make the job of collecting book

auction data easier. For these reasons, the publishers of ABAR will face a growing case for

including on-line auction results in future volumes of the series.

In Section 2, it was noted that there is a gap in ABAR from 1979 to 1982. The

introduction to the first volume of the new series of ABAR (1983-85) foreshadowed filling

this gap by publishing 1979-82 prices in a later issue of ABAR. This is yet to be done, but

remains feasible and worthwhile.

To date, ABAR has focused overwhelmingly on book auctions in Australia. The latest

volume included no overseas results. Many foreign auctions of Australians, including

important sale events in North America and Europe, have evaded the dataset. This is at odds

10 As is usually the case in auctions of paintings, book auction estimates are typically given as a price range. While the precise range is useful for researchers, publishing the mid-point of the range would be a reasonable second-best given the constraint of space in the printed ABAR volumes.

with ABAR's intention to record sales of books of 'Australasian interest' rather than just

Australian book auctions. It was mentioned in section 2 that the data are useful as an indicator

of the availability of different titles. However, to the extent that the database is not

comprehensive of all Australiana auctioned, it is that much less reliable as a guide to

availability. As a minimum, the publishers are encouraged to widen the scope to include

major sale events in the United States and Continental Europe.

Finally, the publishers of ABAR are encouraged to consider electronic publication of

the dataset, perhaps on the internet or via CD-ROM, to enable users to analyse the data more

readily.

7. CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Economists are not included in the intended audience of Australian Book Auction Records,

Yet despite a number of limitations, the records are a useful resource for economists. The data

permit the analysis of auction results across time and space, across different types of auction

events, across different auction firms, and across numerous other dimensions. As the records

are drawn from many different auction houses and are organised bibliographically, ABAR has

considerable advantages over a large collection of auction catalogues and price lists.

The ABAR data, and other compilations of book auction results, promise to shed light

on a number of auction topics, including sequential auctions, the reliability of auctioneers'

price estimates, differences between auctions and other sale mechanisms, the effect on prices

of buyers' premia and other institutional features, and strategic interaction between auction

firms in the form of when, where and how auctions are held.

REFERENCES

Carter, J. (1970) Taste and Technique in Book Collecting , Private Libraries Association,

London.

Dedman, R. (1996) Australian Art Market Movements Handbook, Roger Dedman, Barker,

Victoria.

Hendricks, K. and H. J. Paarsch (1995) 'A Survey of Recent Empirical Work Concerning Z

Auctions', Canadian Journal of Economics, 2,28, pp. 403-26. I

Kagel, J. H. (1995) 'Auctions: A Survey of Experimental Research', in J. H. Kagel and A. E.

Roth (eds), The Handbook of Experimental Economics, Princeton University Press, New

Jersey, pp. 501-86.

Kells, S. (2001) 'Prices in Sequential Auctions: Preliminary Evidence from Australian Rare

Book Auctions', University of Melbourne Department of Economics Research Paper no. 820.

Klemperer, P. D. (1999) 'Auction Theory: A Guide to the Literature', Journal of Economic

Surveys, 13,3, pp. 227-86.

Laffont, J. (1997) 'Game Theory and Empirical Economics: The Case of Auction Data',

European Economic Review, 41, pp. 1-35.

Leamount, B. (1985) A History of the Auction, Barnard and Leamount, London.

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